Thursday, June 21, 2012

Language and reality

Previously I posted about the limitations of analogy in science and theology. Related to this is the limitations of language. One should be wary about assigning too much meaning to the terminology that scientists may ascribe to technically well defined entities: chaos, colour of quarks, local realism, disorder, .....

A simple example is the notion of "imaginary" vs. "real" numbers (these are "complex" numbers).
The "imaginary" numbers do exist, just as fractional numbers are "real" and exist. For a mathematical and logical argument see here. Furthermore, imaginary numbers (and complex) numbers can represent real physical quantities such as the phase and amplitude of an electrical signal.

No comments:

Post a Comment